Volunteers helping track state's white-winged doves

By Lisa Carter - Express-News :
August 6, 2010

Michelle Wood of Texas Parks and Wildlife examines the wing of a white-winged dove in Helotes on Aug. 4, 2010.

Michelle Wood of Texas Parks and Wildlife examines the wing of a white-winged dove in Helotes on Aug. 4, 2010.

Populations of white-winged doves are expanding their range throughout the state, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials are teaming with volunteers on a five-year banding project to determine the reasons.

As part of the agency's mission to manage the state's natural resources, officials designated June 1 to Aug. 15 a trapping period in which volunteers catch and band white-winged doves.

Banding is done to establish where the doves are migrating from, said Michelle Wood, who works for the department.

She said the agency has 70 years' worth of white-winged dove data for South Texas and hopes the project will help determine if the doves migrate from such places as Arizona and Mexico.

White-winged doves first nested in citrus trees in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. However, since a freeze in the 1980s, they've shifted populations to more urban areas. Bexar County has the most, about 7 percent of the total.

Since the trapping period began in June, Wood said, about 1,200 birds have been banded in Bexar County.

Volunteers set traps containing millet and sunflower seeds five nights a week outside their homes or in the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

The wire traps have “funnels” on either side that allow the doves to easily enter the trap, while making an escape nearly impossible.

“Some people were really concerned with the humanitarian aspect of trapping in the beginning,” Wood said. “These are catch-and-release traps, so they're completely humane.”

Once a group of white-winged doves fills the trap, the volunteer encloses it with a tarp or sheet and then removes one bird at a time. The volunteer counts the number of primary feathers — those marked with a white tip — on the dove and inspects the color around its eyes and feet to determine if it's a juvenile or adult. A silver band is placed around the bird's right leg before it's released.

Shelly Kremer, the parks and wildlife department's dove program specialist, said the agency is in its last year of collecting data for the project. She said the number of doves trapped statewide this year is expected to be similar to the 20,844 trapped in 2009. More than 60,000 birds have been banded statewide since the project's inception.

“Very little information is known about white-winged doves in Texas, except that their numbers are rapidly expanding,” Kremer said.

“We've been very successful in trapping, and at the end of the research project, we will have enough of a model to determine their populations' characteristics, such as habitat changes.”